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Practices that Generate Bias
Most people think that discrimination is interpersonal, that it happens between one person another person. But oftentimes it can be built right into a company. So, this would be structural discrimination or structural bias. For instance, something that’s very popular is workplace evaluations or personality profiles where you can take a test and you can decide who’s a leader, who’s a follower, who’s a thinker, who’s more intuitive. Now, if it is the case that these kinds of assessments are normed either in the middle of the country, or they’re normed on a non-diverse population, or they’re normed only on Americans, then it would be no surprise that when you buy this and you use it in the company, you’re the leader, the person that’s going to emerge as a leader is going to look like who was normed on this test, so years and years and years ago.
So if you’re someone who is diverse in some way, who’s maybe from another country or is maybe a member of a diverse group, you might not sort of naturally so flow to the top. People think this is objective, but actually what’s happening here is that this is a structural kind of bias that is saying who a particular leader is. And it’s built right into this assessment that a company buys.
I’ve done work with fire departments, and female firefighters are oftentimes far underrepresented relative to male firefighters. One of the things that happens is their living quarters are actually separated. And people think that this is a good thing, but what it does is that it generates bias because, the women and the men, they’re not together. They wind up not eating together, and they wind up not bonding together. Oftentimes companies actually want to change this, but it’s built into the structure of an institution.
Powerful Cues
There are many different kinds of cues or features of an organization that can inadvertently convey insider or outsider status. And I think the best way to articulate this is with my own story. I was at a startup firm in Silicon Valley. I’m in my early forties. I have knee problems. I walk into this company, and there are lime green and red balls that were rolling all over the place. There are skateboards hanging from the ceilings, and it was a really cool and hip workplace. However, it conveys this really powerful idea that people in their early twenties are the ones that are really valued in this company.
This is a cue. It actually is an idea to sort of break down barriers in the workplace, but we need to be careful when we think about what it is that these cues can convey. I was thinking to myself, “Maybe it’s me. I’m just over the hill.” But later on, someone who was in a wheelchair also came into the company. And after we talked about it, we both shared the same kind of sentiment. And I think the biggest take-home message is what can be interpreted by one person as hip and cool and modern can by another person be interpreted as, “Well, maybe I don’t fit in here, or maybe this isn’t the place for me.”